Quotations for Gardeners, Walkers, and Lovers of the Green Way
Green Way Research, Red Bluff, California

"Sitting in your garden is a feat to
be worked at with unflagging
determination and single-mindedness - for what gardener worth
his salt sits down. I am deeply committed to sitting in the garden."
- Mirabel Osler

"Don't go outside your house to see
flowers.
My friend, don't bother with that excursion.
Inside your body there are flowers.
One flower has a thousand petals.
That will do for a place to sit.
Sitting there you will have a glimpse of beauty
inside the body and out of it,
before gardens and after gardens."
- Robert Bly, The Kabir Book

"Life is a child playing around your feet,
a tool you hold firmly in your grip,
a bench you sit down upon in the evening, in your garden."
- Jean Anouilh

"Have you ever noticed how few sitting
places you find in private gardens? How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True
gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting, never stop ... To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an outrage towards every
felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden."
- Mirabel Osler

"Rocks pray to," said
Grandad. "Pebbles and boulders
and old weathered hills. They are still and silent, and
those are two important ways to pray."
- Douglas Wood, Grandad's Prayers of
the Earth.

"The green metal chair is an indispensable
piece of equipment.
As Farmer Bagley said, "How can you grow anything without
a chair? How else are you going to see what's going on?"
- William Longgood

"Watermelons and Zen students
grow pretty much the same way.
Long periods of sitting
till they ripen and grow
all juicy inside, but
when you knock them on the head
to see if they're ready -
sound's like nothing's going on."
- Peter Levitt, 100 Butterflies

"You are sitting on the earth and you
realize that
this earth deserves you and you deserve this earth.
You are there - fully, personally, genuinely."
- Chogyam Trungpa

"Teach us to care and not to care.
Teach us to sit still."
- T.S. Eliot

"She went, however, and they sauntered
about together many a half hour in
Mr. Grant's shrubbery, the weather being unusually mild for the time of year,
and venturing sometimes even to sit down on one of the benches now comparatively
unsheltered, remaining there perhaps till, in the midst of some tender ejaculation
of Fanny's on the sweets of so protracted an autumn, they were forced by the
sudden swell of a cold gust shaking down the last few yellow leaves about
them, to jump up and walk for warmth."
- Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, 1814

"Tell you what I
like the best --'Long about
knee-deep in June,'Bout the time
strawberries meltsOn the vine, -- some
afternoonLike to jes' git out
and rest,And not work at
nothin' else!"- James Witcomb
Riley, Knee Deep in June

"Spend the afternoon. You can't
take it with you."
- Annie Dillard

"You do not need to leave your
room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even
listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice,
it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
- Franz Kafka

"The seated lotus postures are
an amazing way to go into meditation, or simply just to take a moment to ground
oneself."
- Christy Turlington

"To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure
is the most perfect refreshment."
- Jane Austen

"I like a view but I
like to sit with my back turned to it."
- Gertrude Stein

"I have discovered that all human evil
comes from this,
man's being unable to sit still in a room."
- Blaise Pascal

"Yet it is in this loneliness that the
deepest activities begin.
It is here that you discover act without motion, labor that
is profound repose, vision in obscurity, and, beyond all
desire, a fulfillment whose limits extend to infinity."
- Thomas Merton

"Sit quietly
focus and forget
rest with the great achievement.
The ancient child asks
"what is the great achievement?"
It is beyond description in any language
it can only be felt intuitively
it can only be expressed intuitively.
Engage a loose, alert, and aware
body, mind, and sound
then look into the formless
and perceive no thing.
See yourself as a sphere
small at first
growing to encompass
the vastness of infinite space.
Sit quietly
focus and forget then
in a state of ease and rest
secure the truth of the great achievement.
Employing the truth will not exhaust its power
when it seems exhausted it is really abundant
and while human art will die at the hands of utility
the great achievement is beyond being useful.
Great straightness is curved and crooked
great intelligence is raw and silly
great words are simple and naturally awkward.
Engaged movement drives out the frozen cold
mindful stillness subdues the frenzied heart.
Sit quietly
focusing
forgetting
summon order from the void
that guides the ordering of the universe."
- Tao Te Ching,
Chapter 45, Translated by
John Bright-Fey,
2006

"These forms are not the means of
obtaining the right state of mind.
To take this posture is itself to have the right state of mind.
There is no need to obtain some special state of mind."
- Shunryu Suzuki

"You do not need to leave your room.
Remain sitting at your table and listen.
Do not even listen, simply wait.
Do not even wait, be still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you
to be unmasked, it has no choice.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
- Frantz Kafka

"Yan Hui saw Confucius again and said, "I have made
progress."
"What do you mean?" asked Confucius.
"I sit and forget everything."
Confucius was alarmed and asked, "What do you mean by sitting down and
forgetting everything?"
Yan Hui replied, "I leave behind my body, perception and knowledge. Detached
from both material form and mind.
I become one with that which penetrates all things. This I call sitting and
forgetting everything."
Confucius said, "If you are one with that which penetrates all things you will
be free from partiality. If you are
transformed thus you have become evanescent. You are truly a worthy man. I ask
to follow your steps."
- Zhuangzi, Book 6, Translated by Hyun Hochsmann and Yang Guorong, 2007,
p. 123.

"Meditation is not contemplation either because it
is not thinking at all -- consistent, inconsistent, crazy, sane. It is not
thinking at all; it is witnessing. It is just sitting silently deep within
yourself, looking at whatsoever is happening inside and outside both. Outside
there is traffic noise, inside there is also traffic noise -- the traffic in the
head. So many thoughts -- trucks and buses of thoughts and trains and airplanes
of thoughts, rushing in every direction. But you are simply sitting aloof,
unconcerned, watching everything with no evaluation."
- Osho

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us,
to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry.
But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
- Thomas Mann

"For the time being, well past noon, God,
I ask that you above all leave me alone, that I might just sit here in
the leaf shade, beside this wall with its swallow-thrown shadows and the easy, unmended thoughts time affords me: these solid forms of pots, flush
with zinnias, and the sun patch fading
where the grass snake glides
unknotted.

"As you sit on the hillside, or lie
prone under the trees of the forest,
or sprawl wet-legged by a mountain stream,
the great door, that does not look like a door, opens."
- Stephen Graham, The Gentle Art of Tramping

"Sitting is the gateway of truth to
total liberation."
- Dogen

"I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the
world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware
I sit content.
One world is aware, and by
the far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own
today or in ten thousand
or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take
it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait."
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855, I Celebrate Myself, Line
413

"So let's start by just being aware of the
world around us. Look out there at the sky, and just relax your mind; let your
mind and the sky mingle. Notice the clouds floating by. Notice that this takes
no effort on your part. Your present awareness, in which these clouds are
floating, is very simple, very easy, effortless, spontaneous. You simply notice
that there is an effortless awareness of the clouds. The same is true of those
trees, and those birds, and those rocks. You simply and effortlessly witness
them. Look now at the sensations in your own body. You can be aware of whatever
bodily feelings are present-perhaps pressure where you are sitting, perhaps
warmth in your tummy, maybe tightness in your neck. But even if these feelings
are tight and tense, you can easily be aware of them. These feelings arise in
your present awareness, and that awareness is very simple, easy, effortless,
spontaneous. You simply and effortlessly witness them. Look at the thoughts
arising in your mind. You might notice various images, symbols, concepts,
desires, hopes and fears, all spontaneously arising in your awareness. They
arise, stay a bit, and pass. These thoughts and feelings arise in your present
awareness, and that awareness is very simple, effortless, spontaneous. You
simply and effortlessly witness them. So notice: you can see the clouds float
by because you are not those clouds-you are the witness of those clouds. You can
feel bodily feelings because you are not those feelings-you are the witness of
those feelings. You can see thoughts float by because you are not those
thoughts-you are the witness of those thoughts. Spontaneously and naturally,
these things all arise, on their own, in your present, effortless awareness."
- Ken Wilbur, So Who Are
You

"We spend the first twelve months
of our children's lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve
telling them to sit down and shut up."
- Phyllis Diller

"No thought, no action, no movement,
total stillness: only thus can
one manifest the true nature and law of things from within and
unconsciously, and at last become one with heaven and earth."
- Lao Tsu

"The first level of stillness is about being
with yourself in order to know yourself. This is accomplished by being wide
awake and aware as you deliberately relax into yourself. The idea is to
consciously enter into a state wherein you temporarily suspend everything you
think you know about who you are, including anything you have ever been taught,
and simply be attentive to what's going on right there where you are. You
practice being quiet, both physically and mentally, as you pay attention to the
sensations in your body, the various thoughts in your mind, and your current
experience of being conscious and alive. You practice simple body-mind
awareness, being conscious of the moment you are now in, and thereby experience
with clarity the energy of you. You consciously experience yourself as you
actually are. In this way you open yourself to a new, truer, less distorted
experience of you and the world."
- Erich Schiffmann, Yoga: The Spirit and Practice of Moving Into Stillness,
1996, p. 7.

"Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or
frightened
but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own
private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm."
- Robert Louis Stevenson

"The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat."
- Jules Renard

"He lacks much who has no aptitude for
idleness."
- Louise Beebe Wilder

"The moment I have realized
God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence
before every human being and see God in him - that moment I am free from
bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free."
- Swami Vivekananda

"As evening approached, I came down
from the heights
of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle
in some secluded spot by the lake; there the noise of the
waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my
senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would
plunge me into delicious reverie in which night often
stole upon me unawares."
- Jean Jacques Rosseau

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and
have it all to myself,
than be crowded on a velvet cushion."
- Henry David Thoreau

"The mind can only stand what the butt
can endure."
- Author Unknown

"What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see
standing."
- Gustave Flaubert

"To the mind that is still, the whole
universe surrenders."
- Lao Tzu

"I say to people who care for people who are
dying, if you really love that person and want to help them, be with them when
their end comes close. Sit with them - you don't even have to talk. You don't
have to do anything but really be there with them."
- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"Meditation, witnessing, silently sitting and looking at
the mind, will be of much help. Not forcing, simply sitting and looking. Not
doing much, just watching as one watches birds flying in the sky. Just Lying
down on the ground and watching, nothing to do, indifferent. Not your concern
really, where they are going; they are going on their own."
- Osho

"In this sequestered nook how sweet
To sit upon my orchard seat
And birds and flowers once more to greet ..."
- William Wordsworth

"This magnificent butterfly finds a
little heap of dirt and sits still on it;
but man will never on his heap of mud keep still "
- Joseph Conrad

When Priest Yaoshan was sitting in meditation
a monk asked,
“What do you think about, sitting in steadfast composure?”
Yaoshan said, “I think not thinking.”The monk said, “How do you think not thinking?”Yaoshan said, “Non-thinking.”

"For six years you shall sow your land
and gather in its yield; but in the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, that
the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild
beasts may eat. You shall do likewise with your vineyard, and
with your olive orchard."
- Bible, Exodus 23.10-11

"You can get help from teachers, but
you are going to have to learn a lot by yourself, sitting alone in a room."
- Dr. Seuss

"Profoundly serene is also called Zuo
Wang (Sitting and Forgetting, or Sitting in Abstraction.) The terms
'Profoundly Serene,' 'Sit in Abstraction,' and 'Lofty Tranquillity' are all
ancient expressions of detachment. Thus the Han History has, "Laozi
was profoundly serene" and Huainanzi has, "The way of heaven is
profoundly serene, without fixed form or pattern"; Zhuangzi relates
Yan Hui telling
Confucius he feels better because he can just "sit in abstraction." Literati
artists continued to call on these expressions to describe the attitude they
should have when creating works of art."
- Profoundly Serene

"It is futile to travel to other dusty
countries thus forsaking your own seat. If your first step is false, you will
immediately stumble. All you have to do is cease from erudition, withdrawn
within and reflect upon yourself. Should you be able to cast off body and mind
naturally, the Buddha Mind will immediately manifest itself. If you want to
find it quickly, you must start at once."
- Master Eihei Dogen, 1227, Funkanzazengi (Rules for Meditation).

"I have never practiced sitting
cross-legged nor do I meditate.
My work is what I do and always involves writing materials,
chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises
for my back and I water the plants, of which
I have about two hundred."
- John Cage

“Anyone who thinks sitting in church can make
you a Christian must also think that sitting in a garage can make you a car.”
- Garrison Keillor

"Four-fifths of all our troubles would
disappear, if we would only sit down and keep still."
- Calvin Coolidge

"To tell you the truth, my tenants have a
notion that I am atheistically inclined, by putting
up heathen statues and writing on them certain words in an unknown language.
They
immediately suspected me for a papist, and my statues had been demolished, my
woods burnt and my throat cut had not I suddenly placed a seat under a holly bush
with this plain inscription, "Sit Down and Welcome." I have assured
them that all the
Latin mottoes are to this purpose, and that in places where they cannot sit down, I
have desired them in the old Norman dialect to go to the lodge, and drink whiskey."
- Lord John Orrey (1707-1762), Letters

"Unlike the Inner Smile, which employs a positive
embrace to dissolve fixed perception, zuowang initially employs a negative
method in the sense of releasing what is unwanted. The main difference is the
Inner Smile stays heart-centered, whereas zuowang does not use ongoing
heart-focus. The phrase fasting the heart-mind was made famous by Zhuangzi in
2nd century B.C.E. and later popularized by Sima Chengzhens classic Zuowang lun
in the 8th-century (Kohn 1987). Today zuowang's "sitting in forgetfulness
survives as a staple of modern Chinese Daoist meditators and their acolytes in
the West (Rinaldini 2008; Phillips 2008). Zuowang practice helps the adept to
surrender to the impersonal qi-field of heaven and earth. But it does not
necessarily integrate human heartedness. Zuowang likely inspired Chan Buddhist
sitting in emptiness, which can feel a bit cold, too mental or impersonal for
some Westerners. Yet Daoist zuowang differs from Chan methods and their Japanese
Zen Buddhist offspring in that attaining absolute emptiness is not the goal. In
zuowang the emphasis is more on process, on cultivating spontaneity and openness
to ever-changing currents of the qi-field. The dissolving of the heart-mind is
achieved by allowing each thought, feeling or sensation to manifest without
resistance, and then surrender it to the larger flow of the qi-field to be
creatively transformed. Eventually an unperturbed yet engaged state of mind is
achieved. So zuowang ultimately shifts from release of the negative to a
positive embrace of spontaneity and wu wei. Robinet astutely points out in her
preface to Kohns translation of the Zuowang lun that the process goes beyond
qigong, which grants only longevity. Zuowang is a method of salvation, and as
such is actually preparatory for higher alchemy practice. Zuowang is a double
dissolving, first of the contents of the heart-mind and then of the minds method
of dissolving itself."
- Michael Winn,
Daoist Methods of Dissolving the Heart-Mind.

"Be a spot on the ground where nothing
is growing,
where something might be planted,
a seed, from the Absolute."
- Rumi

"Surely ruminating and lolling,
squandering slivers of time
as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place
on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality,
are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why
shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens,
why not in our own."- Mirabel Osler, The Garden Bench

"I wake up some mornings and sit and have my coffee and
look out at my beautiful garden, and I go, 'Remember how good this is. Because
you can lose it.'"
- Jim Carrey

"What a thing it is to sit absolutely
alone, in the forest, at night,
cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible perfectly innocent speech,
the most comforting speech in the world, the talk that rain makes
by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses
everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going
to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as
it talks I am going to listen."
- Thomas Merton

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage
is also what it takes to sit down and listen."
- Winston Churchill

"A
foundational Daoist meditation practice centers on clarity, stillness, and
emptiness. One sits in a comfortable position either on a cushion or in a chair,
and begins to draw the senses inward, to withdraw from the world of sensory
phenomena and habitual reactivity. The spine is erect, and the crown of the head
and coccyx relax away from each other. One allows breathing to be natural, for
respiration to find its own rhythm. The hands are either placed palms down on
the knees or joined in front of the navel in a Daoist mudra position. With the
tip of the tongue touching the upper palate, one focuses on emptying and
stilling. The ears listen to the center of the head. With the eyelids hanging
and the eyes slightly open, the gaze rests on the tip of the nose. Then the gaze
extends down the front centerline of the body to rest on the lower elixir field
(lower abdomen). One allows emotional and intellectual activity to become
stilled and to dissipate naturally. Over time, stillness deepens and clarity
increases. In Daoism, this practice is often referred to as "entering stillness"
(rujing入靜), "guarding the One” (shouyi
守一), "quiet
sitting" (jingzuo靜坐), "sitting-in-forgetfulness"
(zuowang坐忘), or "fasting the
heart-mind" (xinzhai
心齋). For those beginning Daoist meditation, daily
practice in the morning and in the evening, lasting from twenty to forty minutes
is recommended. Of these various parameters, commitment to daily practice is
most important."
- Daoist Meditation,
The Daoist Foundation

"Strictly speaking, any effort we make is not good for
our practice because it creates waves in our mind. It is impossible, however,
to attain absolute calmness of our mind without any effort. We must make some
effort, but we must forget ourselves in the effort we make. In this realm there
is no subjectivity or objectivity. Our mind is just calm, without even any
awareness. In this unawareness, every effort and every idea and thought will
vanish. So it is necessary for us to encourage ourselves and to make an effort
up to the last moment, when all effort disappears."
- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind

Over 3,800 Quotations, Poems, Sayings, Quips, One-Liners, Clichés, Quotes, and
Insights
Arranged by Over 250 Topics
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From January 1, 1999 through March 1, 2011
This webpage has been online since May 2000
Compiled by
Karen Garofalo
and
Mike Garofalo from Red
Bluff, CaliforniaE-Mail

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